“Who Created Orthodox Medicine?”

Dr. Russell Blaylock:

“Who created orthodox medicine? Where did that come from?”

“Well, it actually came from the Rockefeller Foundation back in 1901.”

“The Rockefellers at the time . . . because of the Standard Oil scandals, no one wanted to be called a Rockefeller.

“Everybody hated all the Rockefellers. And so his friend, Reverend Gates, went to John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and told him, he said, “Well, here’s a way we can repair your reputation.” And he gave him a good example. He said, “There was this man who everybody hated . . . and he started giving money out for all sorts of philanthropic enterprises, and soon people forgot all of the bad things.” . . .

“So the first thing, because Gates’ father was a physician, and John D. Rockefeller’s father was a quack snake-oil salesmen, he said, “Let’s form the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research.” And so they created this in 1901. . . .”

“Rockefeller owned what was called the drug trust: that’s the major drug manufacturing firms all over the world: Merck Pharmaceuticals, Lederle, all of these . . . pharmaceutical companies . . .”

“And of course, the aim was to remove all nutrition, references to nutritional type treatments, from the medical schools. They closed down half the medical schools in the United States. There were 165 medical schools at the time. . . . Then he had his anointed medical schools, which he poured his money into, appointed the professors from his own stock of professors. And so they created an educational system that taught the things that he wanted taught. And therefore every professor that came out of those programs taught the same thing.”

1. http://russellblaylockmd.com
2. The Regimentation in Medicine and the Death of Creativity
3. Flexner Report (http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/sites/default/files/elibrary/Carnegie_Flexner_Report.pdf)

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Meryl Nass
http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com
12/23/2009

How Merck Created a New Disease (Osteopenia) to Sell its New Drug, FOSAMAX/ NPR

MUST_READ from NPR (thanks to Marc Crispin Miller)

… armed with the firm conviction that he was about to do good in the world, and coincidentally sell a ton of drugs for Merck, Jeremy Allen set out to completely rework the way that bone was measured in America.

Now, to do this, he figured, the first thing he needed was an institution, an entity whose mission was not to sell drugs, but to serve the public good. So he decided to create one. In 1995, Allen convinced Merck to establish a nonprofit called the Bone Measurement Institute. On its board were six of the most respected osteoporosis researchers in the country. But the institute itself had a rather slim staff: Allen, you see, was its only employee.

Mr. ALLEN: There was no payroll, there was no building, there was no office with the name Bone Measurement Institute…

… Jeremy Allen says that to encourage other companies to take seriously Merck’s goal of dropping the price of measuring machines, Merck actually purchased a bone measurement business.

Mr. ALLEN: We bought one of the companies and showed how low the price could become purely to get everybody’s attention. And we got everybody’s attention. And subsequently, when everybody else moved, we let it go, and the company closed. And we cheered its demise…

New York Times
November 18, 2009

Senator Charles E. Grassley wrote to 10 top medical schools Tuesday to ask what they are doing about professors who put their names on ghostwritten articles in medical journals — and why that practice was any different from plagiarism by students.

Mr. Grassley, of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, sent the letters as part of his continuing investigation of so-called medical ghostwriting. The term refers to publication of medical journal articles in which an outside writer — sometimes paid by a drug or medical devices company whose product is being studied — has done extensive work on the article without being named on the publication. Instead, one or more academic researchers may receive author credit.

Mr. Grassley said ghostwriting had hurt patients and raised costs for taxpayers because it used prestigious academic names to promote medical products and treatments that might be expensive or less effective than viable alternatives.

“Any attempt to manipulate the scientific literature, which can in turn mislead doctors to prescribe treatments that may be ineffective and/or cause harm to their patients, is very troubling,” the senator wrote.

Some journals, medical associations, writers’ and editors’ groups and pharmaceutical companies themselves have called for crackdowns on ghostwriting. But some universities that employ the professors who put their names on the articles have been slow to respond. Merck, Wyeth (now part of Pfizer), GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca are among the companies accused by lawyers and investigators of providing ghostwriters for research papers.

Mr. Grassley asked the universities to describe their policies on both ghostwriting and plagiarism and to enumerate complaints and describe investigations into both practices since 2004.

Dr. Ross McKinney Jr., director of the Trent Center for Bioethics at Duke University, said faculty who took credit for a ghostwritten paper should suffer the same penalties as students who plagiarized.

“But it is a very, very difficult thing to prove, just as it turns out that plagiarism is hard to prove,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Grassley’s letters went to the top medical schools for research as ranked by U.S. News and World Report this year, in order: Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis, University of California, San Francisco, Duke, Stanford, the University of Washington, Yale and Columbia.

Most of them already have policies against ghostwriting or honorary authorship of research papers, a review of their Web sites shows.

Harvard Medical calls the practices “deplorable.” Duke says, “Severe and/or repeated offenses will result in formal disciplinary action.”

Arthur L. Caplan, director of the Penn’s Center for Bioethics, said there was a difference in degree, if not in kind, between ghostwriting and plagiarism. Faculty members who sign their names to ghostwritten papers for research credit usually have some agreement with the paper, he said, even if, improperly, they did not write it. Students who plagiarize a paper may know nothing about the subject.

“Ghostwriting and plagiarism, they’re on a continuum,” Mr. Caplan said. “They’re related. I wouldn’t say they’re twins, but they’re cousins.”

Mr. Grassley’s letter highlighted the disparate treatment of students and professors who claimed authorship of a paper that was not their own.

“Students are disciplined for not acknowledging that a paper they turned in was written by somebody else,” Mr. Grassley wrote. “But what happens when researchers at the same university publish medical studies without acknowledging that they were written by somebody else?”

The medical schools were asked to answer the questions by Dec. 8.